Deaths of Irish Students in Berkeley Balcony Collapse Cast Pall on Program

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Inspectors on a crane took a closer look Tuesday at the damaged balcony in Berkeley, Calif. The police said 13 people were on the fourth-floor balcony when it gave way.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

BERKELEY, Calif. — They come by the thousands — Irish students on work visas, many flocking to the West Coast to work in summer jobs by day and to enjoy the often raucous life in a college town at night. It was, for many, a rite of passage, one last summer to enjoy travel abroad before beginning a career.

But the work-visa program that allowed for the exchanges has in recent years become not just a source of aspiration, but also a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the wrecking of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara.

Early Tuesday, 13 people, most of them young Irish students here on the visa program, were crowded onto a fourth-floor balcony off Unit 405 for what neighbors described as a loud party when the balcony collapsed, sending people tumbling onto the street below.

Six people were killed; five were Irish and the sixth had dual Irish-American citizenship, according to the Irish Embassy. Three of the dead were men, three were women, and all were in their 20s. At least seven others suffered injuries, some serious.

“We thought it was an earthquake, a really big earthquake,” said Silvia Biswas, 39, who lives a floor below the balcony that collapsed in the Library Gardens Apartments, just a few blocks off a main street here. She had not been able to sleep because of the revelry, she said. “It was kind of like the building was falling down.”

The tragedy reverberated from the streets of this college town — where two young Irish people wandered over to the police barricade to say a prayer and cross themselves — to Ireland.

“It is truly terrible to have such a serious and sad incident take place at the beginning of a summer of adventure and opportunity for so many young people,” Enda Kenny, the prime minister, said in an address to the Irish Parliament.

Philip Grant, the Irish consul general for the western United States, said: “To have this happen at the start of this season has left us frozen in grief. Ireland is a small country. Very few of us have been left untouched.”

He said the first relatives of the dead students were expected to begin arriving here from Ireland shortly.

More than 150,000 Irish students have used the program for J-1 visas to visit the United States in the past 50 years, including 8,000 last summer, officials said. They account for a large part of the students from around the world who avail themselves of a program that allows nonimmigrants to spend a summer here.

A spokeswoman for the Irish Embassy in Washington, Siobhan Miley, said the students often arrive in June and leave in September, with the San Francisco area among the most popular destinations.

In Dublin, students who had participated recalled the program as a high point in their lives. “There was a real sense of freedom about it,” said Shane Daly, 23, who spent the summer of 2012 in Chicago, working at odd jobs in bars, after obtaining his legal degree from Trinity College in Dublin. “It was certainly a rite of passage because it was the first time I really had to do everything for myself.”

Fiona McGoran can still recall the sense of freedom she felt when she landed in New York in 1994. “There was six of us in a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village,” Ms. McGoran said. “It was the best summer of my life — I dreamed of it for a year afterward.”

Ciara Griffin, 24, came to Berkeley in 2011, working in San Francisco but staying here because rent was so much less. “We’re all still talking about the good times we had there,” she said.

“I am absolutely distraught for those people caught up in that tragedy over there,” she said. “This was supposed to be a trip of a lifetime, but suddenly something like this happens and it becomes an absolute nightmare.”

The program has been a source of discomfort. James Howard, 24, who went to San Diego in 2011, said it was basically “party central.”

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Philip Grant, left, the Irish consul general for the western United States, and Neil Sands, of the Irish Network Bay Area, placed an Irish flag at the site of the balcony collapse in Berkeley, Calif.CreditJim Wilson/The New York Times

“There were 18 of us sharing a two-bedroom apartment, and the hundreds of Irish students around us were in a similar situation,” Mr. Howard said.

“It was my first time away on my own for any length of time. I’m glad I did it, but once was enough,” he said.

Cahir O’Doherty, the arts and culture editor of The Irish Voice, wrote a column in 2014 expressing distress at “the callous destruction unleashed by these loaded Irish students” of a house rented in the Sunset District of San Francisco.

“If you know the city you’ll know Sunset is one of the more desirable locations in which to buy a home,” he wrote. “So those J-1 students actually caught a big break by being rented to in the first place. Nice payback, guys.”

“They ripped chandeliers from the ceilings, they broke doors and they smashed windows; they even punched holes in the walls,” he wrote. “Then they abandoned the place without a heads-up or a word of apology.”

The Santa Barbara/Isla Vista Facebook page set up by the Irish students offers a flavor of the work-hard, party-hard lifestyle. Call-outs for car-pooling and accommodations are interspersed with requests for house party sites. Some bars home in on the feel-good, free-spending atmosphere, offering special promotions to the Irish students.

The balcony that collapsed on the four-story building here looks out over Kittredge Street; it fell onto the balcony below. The pale yellow building fills half a block. The double-doors leading to the balcony were closed, and a warning sign pasted on the window could be seen from the street.

City building inspectors blocked access to three balconies on the building on Tuesday, pending further investigation. City officials said the owners of the building had been ordered to remove remnants of the collapsed balcony and perform a structural assessment of the remaining balconies within 48 hours.

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A woman was comforted as she left flowers at the scene of the balcony collapse. A structural assessment has been ordered.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images

In a statement, Lindsay Andrews, a spokeswoman for Greystar, the property management company, said the company would work with an “independent structural engineer and local authorities to determine the cause of the accident.”

Residents here said that apartments were often crammed with students trying to hold down living costs, and that people typically went out to the balcony to smoke.

The police said they received a noise complaint from the building just past midnight, one of about six that came in from various locations around that time. A few minutes later, the police received a string of reports of gunshots fired in South Berkeley, which took priority over attending to the noise complaints.

Officer Byron White of the Berkeley police said 13 people were on the balcony when it gave way about 12:40 a.m., sending debris and bodies plunging to the street.

Ms. Biswas said it sounded earlier in the evening as if the celebrators were shooting off fireworks. After the collapse, she said, she looked out the window and saw people sprawled on the street, and dialed 911.

Gerald Robinson, a massage therapist living in Berkeley, said he was on his way home from the movies when a group of people flagged him down for a ride to Highland Hospital, where some of their friends had been taken. One girl was bloodied, and another girl had an injured leg.

The collapse occurred near the University of California campus here. “Every summer as long as I can remember, a large group of people come from Ireland to visit,” Officer White said.

Laura Harmon, president of the Union of Students in Ireland, described the event as a “terrible tragedy.”

“The scale of it is unprecedented,” she said.

Adam Nagourney and Quentin Hardy reported from Berkeley, and Mitch Smith from Chicago. Douglas Dalby contributed reporting from Dublin, and Noah Smith from San Francisco. Kitty Bennett contributed research from New York.

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